1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to image data, and in particular to modification of compressed image data.
2. Background Art
Image data is increasingly made available over computer networks. Image data is often displayed or made available on a variety of web sites, services and applications.
For instance, a map service, photo service, book search service, or other web service or application that provides content may serve image data.
Further, image data may be compressed according to a compression specification or standard to reduce storage requirements and reduce the bandwidth or work required to transmit image data over a network. One example compression (and decompression) technique, referred to as JPEG, compresses original source image data (also called sample data) into compressed image data.
In certain situations it is desirable to blur or even take down compressed image data quickly. This can be especially needed where a service providing content faces a request from a user or other entity to blur or take down an image due to privacy concerns, legal requirements or other needs. For example, a period of time may be needed to determine whether the blur or take down request must be or should be fulfilled, yet. In the meantime, what is needed is for a blur or takedown request to be at least temporarily fulfilled quickly.
However, in the past, it has been difficult to fulfill such requests quickly without slowing or compromising the performance of the content provider service itself or unnecessarily hurting the experience of users. It is especially difficult to fulfill such blur or take down requests in a live, pipelined environment where a content provider hosts or serves a large volume of compressed image data to a large number of users.